Reception counters and desks in Knight's Hill

Yes. Knight's Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE27. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. A frontage with no stopping is a fitting slot, not a fitting day. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. A converted front room gives a lobby with no depth to it. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. Two levels means two datums, and they are reconciled on paper.

A fitted stair carpet is either lifted or covered, because grit trodden into it under work boots does more harm than the carry itself. A counter top is one long piece with no run of cabinets to break it, so the route decides the join count before the sightlines get a vote. A counter piece walked in on edge needs the headroom checked too. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Crew size follows the distance from the van to the lobby.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. On a fit-out counter the date is half the decision. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Where an operator is fitting out several receptions, the counters come off one slab run so the desks read as a set rather than as neighbours. Nothing is cut until the joinery has been signed off.

A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A curved front is a waterjet job and a carcass problem both. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. What a counter is scribed to is the joiner's carcass rather than the plaster, which is why it is templated after the carcass is fixed and never before. The public face is the face that has to be right. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. The same split runs through commercial property: a landlord fitting out a shell and a tenant fitting out their own reception want different things from one counter. Dilapidations decide more counter specifications than taste does.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Trolleys cross block paving badly, so boards go down first.

Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. Nothing is carried through a reception still taking visitors.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. A lobby is one of the few places a piece can be staged, so the counter comes in early and stands on trestles until the carcass is ready for it. The way in is walked with the joiner as well as with a tape.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above it. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. Stone on a joinery carcass wants that carcass square first.